ARISTOPHANES 203 with the lightest touch. But it is not in denunciation or in banter that his most exquisite faculty is revealed. It is rather in those lyric passages where he soars above everything that can move laughter or tears, and pours forth a strain of such free, sweet music and such ethereal fancy as it would be hard to match save in Shakespeare. A poet who united such gifts brought keen insight and fine taste to the task of the critic. In reading the Frogs, we do not forget that it is a comedy, not a critical essay. And The criticism we allow for the bias against Euripides. in the Frogs. But no careful student of the play can fail to admire how Aristophanes seizes the essential points in the controversy between the two schools of Tragedy. When Aeschylus has said that a poet ought to edify, Euripides rejoins (in effect), "Are you edifying when you indulge in dark grandiloquence, instead of explaining yourself in the language of ordinary humanity ?” Now observe the rejoinder of Aeschylus. He replies, " Great sentiments and great thoughts are suitably clothed in stately words. Besides, it is natural that the demigods (rous μléovs) should have grandeur of words; for their clothes are much grander than ours. I exhibited all this properly and you have utterly spoiled it." Here Aristophanes has put the true issue in a simple form. Aeschylus is right in vindicating his own style, and condemning his rival's, by an appeal to the nature of his subject-matter. Heroes and demigods ought not to speak like ordinary men. He is right, too, when he enforces his point by referring to the stately costume which he had devised for Tragedy. This was a visible symbol of the limit set to realism. When Aristophanes passes from the ground of art to that of ethics, the justice of his criticism may be less evident to moderns, but here also he is substantially right from the Athenian point of view. His Aeschylus complains that Euripides had sapped the springs of civic manliness, of patriotism, and even of morality. It is true that Euripides, as a dramatic poet, had contributed to tendencies setting in that direction. Homer had been regarded by the Greeks as their greatest teacher, because the heroes were the noblest ideals of human life which they possessed. Aeschylus and Sophocles, in their different ways, had preserved the Homeric spirit. If the heroes once ceased to be ideals of human life, the ordinary Greek of the fifth century had no others. To depose the heroes from their elevation above commonplace humanity was also to destroy an indispensable link between god and man in the popular religion. But that religion was at the root of the Greek citizen's loyalty to the city. In the smaller details of his polemic against Euripides, the comic poet is sometimes acute and just, sometimes excessively unfair. We are not here concerned with such details. The broad facts which claim our atten Summary. ARISTOPHANES 205 tion are simply these. Attic Comedy, as such, was the natural foe of a tragic poet like Euripides. Aristophanes clearly understood the artistic limits proper to Attic Tragedy. He clearly saw where and how Euripides had transgressed them; he also saw that this error of Euripides in art was, for the Athens of his day, inseparable from a bad moral influence. And Aristophanes can sum up his judgment by saying that Euripides, in pursuing new refinements, had abandoned the greatest things (rà péyiora) of the Tragic Art-as Athens had known it. Popularity of The very qualities by which Euripides incurred this censure endeared him to later antiquity, both Greek and Roman. As Attic Tragedy perished with Euripides, so the old life of Athens, and of Hellas itself, per later times: ished only seventy years later. Hellas Hellenistic; gave place to Hellenism, a civilization in which Hellenic and foreign elements were mingled. This later Greek age recognized Euripides as its prophet. He had been before his own time, and therefore he was in harmony with theirs. In touching the deep problems of human destiny, he had given utterance to their scepticism, perplexity, melancholy. In drawing human character, he had used a thousand subtle touches which every day they could recognize as true, and which they found in no other poet of old Hellas. He delighted them by the bold ingenuity of his plots and by the brilliant beauty of his descriptions. He was with them, too, in their sorrows; if any one of them had been visited by a cruel reverse of fortune, or by a heart-breaking bereavement, he could find no poet whose sympathy was so human as that of Euripides, or who could so gently unseal the fountain of tears. And therefore Euripides became indeed their idol. He was the inspiration, and in much the pattern, of the new Attic Comedy. One of its poets, Philemon, exclaims, "If the dead retain their senses, as some say, I would hang myself to see Euripides." Roman; mediaeval; At Rome, from the latter part of the third century B. C. onwards, he was equally welcome. Ennius translated the Medea; Pacuvius and Attius took him for their chief model. The Parthian Orodes was seeing a performance of the Bacchae, when the actor who was playing Agave produced the gory head of Crassus. Dante, who does not name Aeschylus or Sophocles, numbers Euripides among the great poets of Greece. In the period of the Renaissance Euripides was more popular than either of the elder dramatists. Racine was his disciple; and his influence predominates in Milton's "Samson Agonistes." It has been his crowning good fortune in modern times that, when a reaction against him came, towards the end of the last century, the reaction was intemperate. Such excessive disparagement as Schlegel's elicited a protest from Goethe, who says that it is absurd to deny sublimity to Euripides, and modern. LATER ESTIMATES OF EURIPIDES 207 and that "if a modern man must pick out faults in so great an ancient, he ought to do it upon his knees." This is one of those generous outbursts which are sure of applause; and yet the defense is not relevant. No intelligent criticism would deny that Euripides is sometimes sublime; he is so, incontestably, in the Bacchae. Nevertheless modern criticism has a right to speak, though it should be reverent. Euripides has qualities which place him among the world's great poets and fully justify all the admiration which he has won from posterity. But these qualities must also be estimated relatively to the form and to the age in which he worked. The conflict of modern judgments upon him has arisen in large measure from failing to keep the two points of view distinct. Some of his best plays charm the modern reader, not merely by particular beauties, but also by unity of effect. Such are Intrinsic merits of Euripides the Medea, the Hippolytus, the Ion, the Bacchae. But it is distinctive of Euripides, as compared with Aeschylus and Sophocles, that the interest of particular passages is usually felt more strongly than the harmony of the whole. There are powerful scenes, which can often be detached. There are ideas, maxims, sentiments, of which it is easy to make an anthology. In an age of intellectual and moral unsettlement, a cultivated man who gives a voice to each doubt or emotion as it arises is certain to have the ear of posterity. It is not only in action that history repeats itself. |